Religious Experiences Shrink Part of the Brain – “The study, published March 30 in PLoS One, showed greater atrophy in the hippocampus in individuals who identify with specific religious groups as well as those with no religious affiliation…. The results showed significantly greater hippocampal atrophy in individuals reporting a life-changing religious experience. In addition, they found significantly greater hippocampal atrophy among born-again Protestants, Catholics, and those with no religious affiliation, compared with Protestants not identifying as born-again.”

Non-independent mutations present new path to evolutionary success – “Mutations of DNA that lead to one base being replaced by another don’t have to happen as single, independent events in humans and other eukaryotes, a group of Indiana University Bloomington biologists has learned after surveying several creatures’ genomes…. [They] found that across the board, about three percent of new mutations are ‘multi-nucleotide mutations,’ or MNMs, perhaps the result of a single, error-prone DNA polymerase making two or more mistakes as it made its way down the chromosome.”

Human Brain Limits Twitter Friends to 150 – “The number of people we can truly be friends with is constant, regardless of social networking services like Twitter, according to a new study of the network.” – the dunbar number again!